Gigabyte GA-G33M-S2H
Candidate two comes out of the Gigabyte factories, which these days output everything from motherboards and graphics cards to cases, notebooks, coolers, power supplies and entire servers. The GA-G33M-S2H is still a compact MicroATX motherboard, like the ECS and MSI boards, but is clearly more sophisticated.
First of all we found that Gigabyte equipped this board with a more powerful four-phase voltage regulator and the full range of overclocking options. These include BIOS items to change processor and memory multipliers, as well as processor, memory and Northbridge voltages. The Front Side Bus speed ranges from 100 to 700 MHz, though anything close to the maximum value doesn’t work at all. The four-phase voltage regulator lets this board accept virtually any Socket 775 processor from Intel, including a Core 2 Quad Core Extreme Edition, which is rated at a maximum power draw of 130 W. The more powerful regulators have the disadvantage of requiring more energy when running under low load, though : this motherboard was the one that consumed the most power.
Like the two other contestants, the G33M-S2H has four Serial ATA/300 ports. Three are meant to be used inside your PC, the fourth one uses an eSATA connector for external storage products. Gigabyte also added a Firewire controller by Texas Instruments (IEEE-1394a at 400 Mb/s) and an optical digital audio connector (SP/DIF).
There is a x16 PCI Express slot, which can be used to install a discrete graphics card or any other PCI Express device. And there is an additional x1 PCIe slot, which you can use for other PCI Express expansion cards. We liked the fact that it wasn’t placed right next to the x16 slot, so you can install a high-end graphics card - which usually requires two slots due to the use of large cooling devices - while only losing one of two 32-bit PCI slots. Gigabyte doesn’t seem to trust Intel’s judgment on leaving UltraATA behind, as it added a simple UltraATA/100 controller by Jmicron to support two devices using one channel.
This motherboard is the only product in this roundup that offers digital outputs for your display - in fact, you can even hook up two displays to this MicroATX board with its integrated graphics unit. Gigabyte provides one D-Sub port for analog displays, one DVI-D (digital output) and one HDMI port. D-Sub can be mixed with any of the digital ports, but you cannot use HDMI and DVI at the same time. Intel’s graphics software is capable of supporting two displays right from the start on either Windows Vista or XP. We’d love to see a motherboard that offers two integrated DVI ports, as I personally would not want to attach a DVI display via D-Sub due to visible image quality issues.
200.5 MHz is slightly overclocked, but this has to be considered normal : almost all boards run at slightly increased clock speeds.
